Well, they have to be better than the alternative, all things being equal, unless you don't believe that competition works. If a local government becomes too corrupt and too overbearing, the governed can at least revoke their consent by voting with their feet and turning that bitch into Detroit. You can't escape Fedzilla, though, short of leaving the country altogether and renouncing citizenship.

It's no panacea, but then there is no perfect solution. At best, it will forever be a game of whack-a-mole. The nature of power is that those who have it will make those who don't suffer just as much as they are willing to suffer. Not surprisingly, it turns out that a government-educated populace that has never sweated or bled for anything is willing to suffer quite a lot. And once there becomes a well defined class of ruling elites who see themselves as separate from and superior to the plebs, you will always be on the road to disaster. Particularly when they become as effete and inept as the present western ruling class, most of whom have reached that stratosphere by going to the right schools and kissing the right behinds and spouting all the right platitudes. There is no system on Earth that is better than any other in this regard once that level of bifurcation and decadence is reached, and arguably the debased popularity contest that is an advanced democracy is worse than a more meritocratic system of, say, fighting each other to the death for political power in an arena. At least then the rulers wouldn't be such an insufferable bunch of glorified sob sisters.

How is it dumb? Look how much power Russian oligarches have, as an easy example, you don't think American oligarches can do the same? And no they can't directly control the US but they can have massive influence on the government. Would Saudi Arabia and Israel create lobbies in the US if they knew they didn't have influence? Of course not. Those are just foreign countries, you should check out the lobbies huge corporations have.

Now your workers example is technically true but it is much more complicated than that. For many coporations, the workers live in countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia and work at the factories there. Those people have little rights and no influence what so ever at what happens at the companies they work for, they can't strike because it's the only thing keeping them alive and they're expendable. Now, Starbucks is a bit different because they employ many Americans and have good pay. And that's exactly the problem, try convincing the Starbucks workers to quit their jobs and protest, they won't. Especially since for example here in Canada many of those workers are young people who just need a bit of money, they really don't care as long as they get paid, especially since the working conditions are fairly good.

Some countries are better than others in that regard. In Canada companies do not have as much of an influence as in the US but its still there and it will always be there because they are a fundamental part of the economy. The US happens to be home to the biggest and richest ones and they want their interests to be protected, and if the system allows it, they will.

As long as I have my Starbucks.

In other words, I insulted a bunch of people itt and stated something that seemed obvious too me at that time but after getting into a coversation in something I'm ill educated in and after reading what you said, it leaves me thinking. Thinking about it, I should probably have lurked this thread.

The candidates for your local election are picked by the party donors. For Labour, primarily the large national unions. For Conservatives, primarily other special interests in finance, defense, and other corporate lobbyists.

You get to choose from candidates who have been selected for you.

The year before last I actually asked Michael Fallon why the Conservatives don't move to an open primary system for selecting candidates for election, his response was quite simple: "We have to give the donors something for their money".

No worries, we've all been there.

Forgive me ;_; I was young and stupid. I'm older now, I promise!

If time was frozen, then true federalisation "works" in the sense that you're talking about. The thing is, the oligarchs (or want-to-be) know this... and so it becomes their target. This is what I meant in my very first post about the current situation being "inevitable".

Small government will always turn into big government. Hell, the US started off with the principles of being the smallest government imagineable, and just two hundred short years later, we're now looking at the largest government monstrocity in human history. Not that it even took that long for big gov't to rear its ugly head... how many years was it before a President Washington marched troops down to Pennsylvania over a tax?

Of course. I don't argue that it "works". Nothing does in the long run. There have to be revolutions eventually, and after each one you are always on borrowed time until the next one. We're well overdue currently. I only mean that, if it is true that legitimate power can only come from the consent of the governed - and everybody seems to agree on that in theory though they may violate it in fact on a daily basis - then huge swaths of the governed can't be dissolved into a massive empire in such a manner that a coalition of states can tell people in another state on the other side of the country how to behave in their own goddamn state, and oh, by the way if you try to leave the union we'll kill ya 'cause More Perfect Union.

As for anarchy, feels good and all that, but I can't see how a power vacuum isn't going to be filled by people who don't even have to pretend to like your stupid ass or care about your hahaha "rights". So in that sense, it's also on borrowed time. Additionally, it won't be long until people organize some thing that is functionally a state, anyway, whether or not they call it one. Just as surely as small government will always turn into big government, no government will always turn into some government. Best to keep it close, I think.

Sacramento is a much larger threat to your liberty than D.C. How has its location changed any of that? The people in the Californian State Government are like the Feds on steroids.